A Short History of Richard Kline (13 page)

Look how his mind had wandered already! He recollected himself.

Jack was talking about peak performance. ‘During meditation the body enters into deep levels of relaxation and rest, a more profound rest than that experienced even in deep sleep. The body becomes attuned to the subtle vibrations of nature, which repair the body and release the creative energies of the human organism …'

Next to Rick, Mark had fallen asleep, which was not surprising – the words had a high degree of abstraction, an airy quality, and Mark often didn't leave his workstation until after ten at night. And Jack had a soft, soothing voice that exuded warmth. The effect was indeed soporific. Jack was, he could see, a very contained man, though with a surprising tendency to giggle. Nevertheless, there was something attractive in his persona that was hard to define, a subtle quality.

Rick looked around him. Not everyone, it was clear, had a mind as restless as his or as tired as Mark's. Everyone else appeared attentive, and serious. Most of them were younger, and as junior executives they were used to paying attention, used to listening for the ‘hook', the slogan, the key phrases, the code words, the ‘open sesame'. And now they were here for the mantra. As Mark would say: if it works, it's cool.

In Jack's discourse there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on the brain. But what about the heart? As if reading Rick's mind, Jack moved on to the subject of ‘perfect health' – didn't these people ever use qualifiers? – and heart disease, and how medical research had shown conclusively that meditation regularised blood pressure and lowered cholesterol. In orthodox terms, this was its area of greatest success.

Beside him, Mark had begun to snore gently. Jack's soft tones were such that perhaps they didn't need to learn to meditate; perhaps all they needed was a tape of his voice, with one of those piping flutes in the background and the sound of running water. On the way over Mark had told him about the time he worked for an IT company in Palo Alto, California, where, during a particularly tense and difficult project, one of the supervisors had had a notion to play a relaxation tape in the office, until all the programmers had shrieked that it was getting on their nerves. Tonight, however, ‘the voice' was working for Mark, who had dozed through almost the entire talk: eyes closed, head slumped forward on his chest.

Jack concluded by asking each of them to say why they had come. And they all said something sensible. They wanted ‘better concentration'; they wanted ‘to achieve more', to double their current workload. They wanted to feel less tense, less tired, less impatient, more calm. No-one said they wanted to maximise their potential. No-one admitted to being fed up and angry. And no-one talked about ‘the mysterious absences at the heart of even the fullest lives', to quote from a book review Rick had idled through in the dentist's surgery some days before.

Mark woke up in time to say that he regarded his body as a prime racing machine, and just lately he had realised it needed a bit of a tune-up.

Rick said he wanted to get more done with less fatigue. What else was he going to say? That he was angry? And that as he grew older he was getting angrier? Angry at the universe for failing him? Listening attentively to the reasons the others gave for being there that night, he wondered if they too were dissembling, camouflaging some inner vision of flames – some moment of madness, some visceral ache of yearning – with the managerial workspeak of the brochure, a language they had learned to wear like a suit of armour, like battle fatigues.

The introductory talk finished early, around nine-thirty, and he hadn't far to drive his companion, who asked to be dropped off at a club in Oxford Street. Refreshed by his nap at the meditation centre, Mark was ready to party. On the way up the hill Rick teased him about falling asleep, and with the disarming ingenuousness of a child Mark asked for a ‘recap' on what he had missed.

‘Fill me in, K,' he said. ‘What was the gist of it?'

‘Some things are too subtle to be rendered into paraphrase.'

Mark threw back his head. ‘Seriously?' And then, ‘Yeah, yeah, I'll bet.'

God, he was a boy, a slick, smart-arsed boy. ‘You'd better stay awake tomorrow night.'

‘Yeah, definitely, if you say so, K,' he said, winking at Rick as he lurched out of the car at an intersection and sauntered off up the neon-lit street.

Driving home, Rick was disconcerted by the fact that, even if there had been time, he couldn't have told Mark much of what Jack had said. Was his concentration as shot as all that? Or had it all been too vague, too abstract? He would have to say the evening had been something of an anticlimax: he had hoped for revelations but none had come. Perhaps the first night was a test, and if you persevered and kept coming back, in the end you'd get a pay-off: the magic word, the open sesame.

And you did. Get the magic word, that is. On the second night Jack told them about the mantra. The mantra was a special sound. It was like a key in the lock of their inner being, and the insistent chanting of it would open them up and put them in touch with … with what? On this, they still weren't clear. Everything Jack said sounded reassuring at the time but evaporated from their ears within seconds.

For the next two nights the talks continued as before. And each evening Mark sat dozing in his chair beside Rick so that Rick had to ‘recap' for him on the way home before dropping him off at a club: Zero in Oxford Street, Moscow in Surry Hills, Yada Yada in Leichhardt. Clubs seemed to have a life of twelve months; Rick hadn't heard of any of them. It made him feel old. ‘I don't know any of these places,' he said.

Mark shook his head in mock commiseration. ‘This is what happens when you get married, K.'

Rick continued to find it extraordinarily difficult to summarise what Jack said about anything. Zoe would ask him and he would hesitate and then ramble. It was as if the words were little nodules of polystyrene filler, the kind that come as packing around white-goods and spill out of the box when you attempt to extricate the appliance. You could gag on them. At other times the words felt like ball bearings rolling around in his mouth: precise, elegant and full of weighty momentum, but also cold, smooth and hard to trap.

One night, clearly bored with Rick's struggle to condense ‘the message', Mark interrupted his waffling to say, ‘Y'know, K, I was really surprised when I saw you'd put your name down for this course. You impress me as the strong type. You know' – his mouth curled into a mock grimace – ‘“Stress? What stress?”'

‘I
am
the strong type,' Rick said.

He was not about to enter into emotional correspondence with a younger man. This was taboo. And anyway, it was far too difficult to explain, especially to someone like Mark, that lurking in his consciousness, like a virus in the bloodstream, was a sliver of pain he could neither disgorge nor salve. He could think of some parodic scenario that might make sense to Mark; a virus, say, infecting his program, or that movie
Fantastic Voyage
, where something was making its way through the pathways of the body, like a microchip afloat in a vast cyclotron.

Was this pain in the shadowy background of his consciousness, or at the forefront of his
un
conscious? Whatever
that
was. When he thought of it at all he tended to think of the unconscious as a playing field where small, neurotic athletes jostled for position, and learning to meditate might enable him to marshal them into a team where all the elements could combine well, could get onto cosy terms, could resolve whatever it was that was creating friction between them. The mantra would be the oil in the ‘grease and oil change', to adapt Mark's metaphor, the soothing balm that would ease the disparate elements into the right formation, and he would become a cyber program without glitches. Debugged. The perfect dream of neuroscience. At last he would be rid of that unresolved yearning that had haunted him all his life, that was so unsettling, like a metaphysical pinprick in every balloon of pleasure, in every activity, actual or potential, virtual or real.

On the fourth night, they got it. The mantra. The pay-off, the magic formula.

As usual, he and Mark drove straight from the office but this time they were late. When Mark wanted to stop near Taylor Square and get a falafel, Rick said, ‘We haven't time.'

‘I'm starving.'

He knew that, like many of his team, Mark would have skipped lunch, or shot out for a Mars Bar from the vending machine in the corridor. The way they worked was crazy. In the glovebox, he told Mark, there was a bag of roasted almonds kept there by his very practical wife for times like this, or for when Luke was hungry. And had he, Mark, remembered to bring the ritual offering? He'd half-expected Mark to forget this – the flowers and the fruit that they were required to bring as a gesture of respect – but was touched to find that Mark hadn't forgotten, that he had some grapes in a takeaway food container that he produced from his designer backpack, along with a bunch of violets he had bought at the station on his way to work.

When they arrived there was an air of quiet expectation. Everyone was sitting on the meeting-room chairs with their small parcels of flowers and fruit on their knees. Some had bought large, expensive bunches, wrapped in sharp peaks of cellophane and tied with twirling boutique ribbon. Others appeared to have garnered random blossoms from the garden, or purchased something cheap and already wilting about the edges from a fruit stall.

Rick was the first to be initiated.

In a small room at the top of the stairs Jack was waiting, seated in a cane armchair. Against the wall and facing the door was a table that had been turned into a simple altar with a gold silk cloth and a single candle. Jack was dressed, as ever, in his corporate suit and welcomed Rick with his usual glowing smile. Awkwardly, and with both hands, Rick held out his small bouquet of Zoe's roses and an apple and banana wrapped in foil. The ritual gifts, the token of respect. But respect for whom, and for what?

Jack accepted the gifts and placed them casually on the altar. ‘This is a very simple procedure,' he began, ‘and it won't take long. I'm going to say a prayer in Sanskrit in praise of all gurus, or spiritual teachers, and then I will give you your mantra.'

Spiritual teachers?
What spiritual teachers?
Could Jack be classified as a spiritual teacher? Surely not? All through the course, Rick had resolutely turned his face away from the more esoteric character of Jack's discourse, something hazy that seemed to hover on the fringes of his perception. He knew meditation was an adaptation of a practice derived from eastern mysticism, with the same origins as, say, a suburban yoga class, and beyond that he did not intend to venture. It wasn't necessary, as Jack himself had intimated from the outset. But now the presence of the altar, however minimalist, made him feel uncomfortable.

It was a low-key ceremony, simple and precise. The mantra was no recognisable word, just a high-pitched sound, an exhalation of air with the tongue against the bottom teeth. Jack said it, and then he asked Rick to say it.

After he had repeated it a few times, Jack said, ‘Good,' and then cautioned him not to repeat it to anyone else as this would diminish its potency.

Rick nodded, but his neck felt stiff. He hadn't expected to be inducted into anything spiritual; he thought he was getting a technique that was scientifically based.

As if reading his mind, Jack said, ‘Remember, this is not a religion – you are not being asked to adopt any set of dogmas. Just meditate on your mantra each day, morning and evening, and come back in a week for a checking.'

And that was it. Something of an anticlimax, really. At the back of his mind was the thought that some people, not under corporate sponsorship, were paying hundreds of dollars for this. Could anything that expensive be this simple? Could anything worth having be this simple? Could peace of mind ever be simple?

Mark was second-last to go in. Rick waited for him on the verandah, looking out over the dusky roofline of the hill, the purple night sky over Port Jackson. Eventually Mark emerged, exhaling heavily in a bemused sigh. ‘I need a ciggie,' he said. ‘Do you mind waiting?'

Like furtive children, they moved into the side lane and Mark lit up. He looked around him, up and down the lane, down at his feet, and then up and down the lane again. He seemed edgy.

‘So that's it, K,' he said.

‘Apparently.'

‘The secret word.'

‘Yep.'

‘Is yours one syllable or two?'

‘One.'

Mark seemed reassured by this, as his was two, which meant at the very least that they were not all getting the same mantra. This would have been an affront to them both.

‘Are you seriously going to do this every morning and every night?' Mark asked.

‘I'm going to try. I'll give it three months.' Something told Rick that Mark wouldn't last three days. He seemed unhappy with the outcome; his cocksureness had fallen away and he was peculiarly sombre. He was as restless and as jittery as ever, but not in his teasing, good-natured way – more irritable, hostile even, curiously offhand.

‘I'm starving,' Mark said, with a sharp intake of breath, and tossed his glowing butt into the bougainvillea that ran like flame along the side wall. And then, brusquely, ‘Do you have to go home? Why don't we go somewhere and eat?'

‘Why don't you come back to my place?' Rick had been thinking of bringing Mark home for a while. Zoe would find him amusing.

Mark hesitated, and then with a shy, haunted look he said, ‘No, no, thanks anyway. I'll grab a bite on the way home.' There was something in the way he said it, something in his manner that was worrying. For Rick, the little ceremony had been of scarcely any moment – bland, even – but Mark seemed unnerved. He felt protective towards him.

‘Let's go to Miro's,' he said, mentioning a bistro only a few streets from where he lived. Mark could get a taxi on from there.